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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

(This is in reply to this post on Indian Express and will make much more sense if you read that post first. )Disclaimer: This article is meant to be mostly humor and an alternate viewpoint, no offense to the author of the post I am replying to or any Chennai-ite. Also, I used to be a Chennai-ite myself, and am still unable to call any other city "home". I do not mean to say that Chennai is more unsafe than any other city but I disagree with the fact that it is not unsafe. Nor do I mean that Chennai is worse than any other city, just that there is more to it than the surface.---Every girl in the world ought to grow up in a city like this, one that doesn't frighten her anymore, because she is too numb by now.

For a reason that is obvious to anyone who knows me, I often say
that I am from Chennai- because though I didn't always live there and wasn't even born there, I am of this city. I often say that this city belongs
to me, though of course real estate agents and politicians will tell you otherwise. I imagine that I always knew these streets, that they were never
new to me- which is ridiculous because they were indeed new to me when I was 3 or 4. I imagine that I've never gotten lost, that I always knew
where I was going- something even more ridiculous considering I usually stumble when an interviewer asks "Where do you see yourself 5 minutes from now?"I first came to Chennai when it was Madras (and it always shall be, to me) and I was the youngest
6-month old in the world. Of course, 5-month olds were younger than me. I grew to be young and ridiculous like only little girls can be. And young girls. And women. And men. Strike that out. I think most young people ARE ridiculous anyway. I never lived in a hostel in Madras, but you couldn't tell the difference. I was hidden away with my brother at home, where I had to be back from the playground by 7, even though the playground was visible from our balcony. Where I used to wonder why the auto-driver who dropped my friend to school made unnecessary, uncomfortably prolonged eye contact that somehow made my skin crawl, even at 7. Where my mother would panic about her daughter's safety if I returned 15 minutes late from the nearby stationery store. She never told me why, she never told herself why I guess, but Madras was still part of India. My life was mostly between school and home, and then paatu class and home, of course escorted by someone. The one time I travelled the 500 feet between home and paatu class wearing an imported knee-length skirt that some America-settled cousin had gifted, 2 stranger aunties stopped me to advise. And one old lady actually yelled at me for being a bad girl and not following our culture, a phrase I got to hear far too often in later years. I had been 10 then.I don't know how your friends were decided upon in those days. If you ask me, I'd say with no rhyme or reason. We played hide-and-seek and lock-and-key and paandi and an obscure game called Fruit's cut with people whose names we would forget the next day. And yet, the most unlikely of friendships
would spring up between such playmates. With the intricate politics that I then thought only children are capable of.

Girls like me who were nerds and bookworms, girls who weren't. Girls who were the best pick of Antakshari teams, girls who were great at getting tenth-standard-akka-anna gossip. Boys who would pull our pigtails, boys who wouldn't. Boys who we kicked under the bench when they annoyed us, boys who kicked us back. We all became friends. We laughed together and borrowed each others' pen-pencils and boasted about our latest fancy water-bottles, not knowing that these uninhibited conversations would not last forever.
And together we learned about this city. We walked uncertain, in
large groups, ran across L.B.Road not holding hands, clung to the
handrails as we took the 29C, learned how to not notice what those annas were saying, though we probably would not have understood if we had listened- we just knew they weren't right. We laughed at the girls who put on Peter-accents, and learned to get scandalized about boys and girls talking. Or standing alone. Or looking at each other. We learned to denounce people who drink, people who did "only" an arts degree instead of engineering, pretty much people. We learned that being a vegetarian made you "pure" and that you must always eat well before you visit a relative, especially if they are richer. We learned the infinite acting that adults do- games against people, games against games, vicious hatred beneath benevolent smiles. We ate whatever we wanted and some of us grew fat and hated ourselves for it. But not as much as we hated those of us who ate and did not grow fat.We shopped for Dairy Milk and Lacto King in corner potti-kadais and begged our parents to let us go watch My Dear Kutti Chaathan by ourselves.
We ended up going with 2 adults as escorts. And when a group of us decided to go watch King-Kong by the time I was 18, we knew better not to dare look at the hooting boys that would lurk in the dark of the theatres.
We had been taught love was a bad thing often enough not to dare fall in love in these streets or have our hearts broken.
We watched the Adyar signal's face marred with a fly-over, watched Singapore Shoppe close and thought the
world was over. We all have images in our head that only grow sweeter with time, but some that always send a chill down our spines.
For me, it is the memory of my walk to Eliots which I did so often I don't know which day I am thinking of. It is possibly the time I knew I was leaving Madras to go to college. All I wanted that day was to stand at the shore, let the humid air wash over me like the water washed my feet and silently talk to the Bay of Bengal. Silence? Did I say silence? I hadn't known what it was then. Madras is never silent. The memory is still fresh and I can almost see the creepy old man walk by- and though he meant no harm, Madras had taught me to be scared of anything and anyone who was not educated, white-and-white class. He did nothing, said nothing, but the fear still tingled my spine. The chill today is not because of the man, but because of the fear I felt then. The number of times aunties worried about me walking back home after dark, the number of subtle sentences they said about school-van drivers and shopkeepers being dangerous without quite explaining how or why- nothing could frustrate a curious young happy girl more- had all instilled a nameless fear of the new in me. Something I took very long to outgrow.I also remember the number of neighbours who judged us on wearing jeans instead of frocks or cutting my hair short. I remember the time when we were watching a cartoon movie and my friend's mother walked in during a bad scene (the cartoon bunny was kissing a cartoon girl-bunny), her anger reaching catastrophic levels as we small children cursed ourselves for not changing the channel fast enough.Today, when I return to Madras in my head, I am happy in a way that makes sense- the city has grown and matured into Chennai. I am happy that the traffic jams are not half as bad as Bangalore or Mumbai, and happy to see the fewer uptight stares at girls in shorts. I
hear people speaking Tamil and being nice to each other in their typical friendly, hypocritical way and I could burst into tears of joy. I miss the double standards and undercurrent of things never said, as much as most typical authors miss Idly and filter coffee.I am reminded of the naive girl I once was and all the things I thankfully will
never be, because I got out and saw a little of the world and learned to laugh at myself without taking offence. I wish every girl in the world could grow up in a city like
this- that teaches her the complexity of human thought so early in life, that teaches her management-school-level-hypocritical-networking so early it becomes part of her system. A city that doesn't frighten her, because by now she is cautious and numb. That makes her feel like all of this,
this business of life is something we will get better at deceiving.
When you are young in Madras, the sun is always shining down on
you at 36-42 degrees Celcius and the sea breeze somehow always finds a way to irritate your sticky sweaty skin. It is not hard to
imagine that this is how life will always be. That you will always be
with your friends laughing, jam-packed in an auto and believing that what you know is the end of the world. That there always
will be a cheerful, infectious syncopated beat playing in the
background, along with aachaaramana maamis who are offended by their servant maid's daughter accidentally touching them, and who believe that a girl with a period is worse than a human being. That at no point in time do smiling people in colour co-ordinated
outfits start dancing around us except in a movie.That there are different ways to look at the same thing. Always.---Edit 1: After one of my friends mentioned, I realized what was not quite right about my post. I was saying "Chennai" in places where I really meant Madras. Corrected.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

In the early hours before dawn,When the world seems to be holding its breath andwaiting, waiting with pinkish grey skiesyet more beautiful than the miracle its waiting for...I walk along this solitary lane,the moon glowing away on one sideand the light breaking at the horizon,listening silently to my heart's music..I think of the beautiful moments in my life,Catching the sunset on the silent shoreChasing the moonlight till my eyes sorePeople. Places. Words. And some more.

I think of you and the long conversationsThe world that seems rosy in your presenceFlowers, spring, rainbows, sunshine.And yet all we have are our thoughtsAnd that precious space where your mind meets mine.I'm half asleep, the air's a tad cold.But I walk on, with your ideas like a hand to hold.Trying to preserve this moment in my headTo look back on a day when we shall be old;

I know on that day we shall not rememberWe shall walk on- just another couplevanishing in the anonymity of life-dying but not dying, like a piece of ember.The jarring noise of familiarityWould choke that space we treasure nowAnd then we would wonder howwe ever thought we knew love.Yes, some day we shall grow oldand the magic will be goneThe flowers would droop, the rainbows will vanishAnd it would be dawn.But maybe it doesn't matterthat this treasured moment doesn't last-We may forget and we may breed contemptWe may move out of the past-

Just to know I had this minute - this sacred moment before dawnwhen I was waiting in excited pleasurecontentment. joy. desire.That life had given me this one instant that the ennui cannot snatch awayThat I could feel the magic of lovethe idealistic romance that poets say

Just to know I had this minuteit does not matter what price the future demandsJust to have known this surreal headinessit does not matter that there will be dawns..

Thursday, September 12, 2013

It's unbelievable that exactly a year ago, I was battling 3 courses for grade, 1 on unregistered audit and an RA. And one of the graded courses had 2 sections, both of which I attended because the lectures had a different emphasis in each. So you see why I said battling. Though I still found time to ping some friends, watch Jon Stewart almost regularly and Skype for an hour in the morning and night on an average, life was mostly a long unending race of deadlines and GNU debug..Admittedly, I didn't do a thesis. Maybe I should have. In contrast, life today is a breeze. A cakewalk. "Plum" as we used to call it in third grade.

Now you might think I am boasting. I am not.* I brought this up because now that I am back on a job, I hear people say "Oh I have too much work yaar" or "I am too busy" more often. Oh, wait. I meant people saying this more often, unjustifiably. Especially in response to innocuous greetings like "Hey! What's up?" (When some grad students said this, it was an understatement. When people at my office say this, I know it's something bigger than hyperbole.) Let me explain.

Most industry jobs are not particularly killing. You use your brain alright, but (unless you are in a research division or a startup) they don't need you to key in more than 40 hours per week. (Even 40 is a lot, but at least that's what you are paid for.) Nor are they rocket science. In fact, they are mostly easy and just challenging enough to keep you interested- BY DESIGN. Think about it. If your job were super-complicated and you decided to quit, your company will have to shut down. That almost never happens. And it doesn't happen because companies are DESIGNED to be successful even if a few (not all) of their best employees leave. So, while this might hurt or be bitter- the job you (and I) are doing is very much normal, unsophisticated and anyone with an average intelligence can be trained to do it.

This being the case, why do people often say they have too much work? Mostly because everyone else does it. It seems like if you said you didn't have much work, people would think you are slacking off. It is the same reason people pretend to be looking at an xterm every time you walk into their office. It's mostly just a way to up themselves. (Of course, someone might say they are too busy just to avoid you, but that's for another day.)

So, when I hear someone say "they have too much to do" every single workday, if I were to believe them, I'd infer one of the following:

They are lousy at their job and need too much time to do it.

They are very unproductive and need too much time to finish their work because they are wasting their time on useless tasks and facebook, but somehow counting it as "work".

They are very inefficient and solve problems in roundabout manners, thus taking more time.

They are very poor at organizing their work and do not know how to find time for other things.

They are losers who do not have an active enough brain to have a work-life balance.

Seriously.

Ok. Like everything else, there are exceptions. There are "crunch-time"s (and "dungeons" in Intel parlance) when you really are "busy". And there are the few of you who actually have enough career growth to show for your work. But as I said, they are 'exceptions'. "Wait", you say, "What if I love my job so much I want to do nothing else?". Well, you almost had me stumped there, but no. If you love your job AND work too hard AND didn't grow it's time you worked on your soft skills. Did I mention organization?

So, with no offence to anyone who ever said this to me- if you cannot find time to take a break or eat lunch or talk to your friends in the weekend because "you have too much work", a) remember what you said makes me think much lesser of you b) you are probably wasting your time and/or are in the wrong job.

Now those of you who I forgot to ping/respond to, forget I ever wrote this post! :P And I was being lazy...um.. busy. I said busy.

Edit 1: It's sometimes haunting when you find someone else wrote almost exactly the same thing you did, and worse, around the same time. Few days after I wrote this, I found an HBR post which is along the same lines as this post here.

* I know too many people who can do too much more with their time, I am almost humiliated when I list this because this is all I did with my time.**Numbers based on hardware/semiconductor industry. Might vary a lot based on your line of work and country of work.